Brass Trax

Children make some really freaky music. It’s not just their squeaky voices that trip you up, joined though they are to professional backing tracks and squeezed by a studio producer into a smooth terrine of pop music. It’s also their naive approach to artistry and melody and the adult concerns—sex, drugs, love and death%mdash;that they are too young to articulate in any artistically convincing way. And, yet, sometimes they do.

Musical Youth was a reggae quintet, composed of Jamaican and British children, who had a brief moment and a number one hit, in the spotlight of New Wave. Musical Youth bore more than a passing physical resemblance to an earlier group of five, but they had neither the inborn talent nor the marketing acumen that benefited the Jacksons. What they had, instead, was soul.

“Pass the Dutchie” was a number one hit in 1982, and it won the group a backing gig with Donna Summer and a slot in MTV’s rotation, the latter a rarity at the time for black musicians. It’s easy to hear why the song hit. It’s a sly reworking of the Mighty Diamonds’ “Pass the Kouchie,” a ganja anthem so enthusiastic that it includes the sound of a man sucking down smoke. The word “kouchie,” or “joint,” was dropped from the lyrics and replaced by “dutchie,” slang for a dutch oven. The substitution, which had the obvious effect of making the song no longer indecent for children, also wrestled the original material into something more enduring.

“How does it feel when you’ve got no food?” Musical Youth asks, instantly transforming the Mighty Diamonds’ stoner stroll through a park of pot smokers into a tour of urban poverty. All five of the children sing, either lead or backup, and their delivery has a fragile and cheery sincerity that cuts through their lyrics like a surgeon’s scalpel, revealing a carapace of pop vacuity. Most listeners, after all, who picked up the single in the U.K. and the U.S. precisely did not know how it feels when you’ve got no food. Yet, there it is in the voice of the children. Poverty and joy, united by the promise of a tune that will make you “wine up the waist.”

Listen to “Pass the Dutchie” by Musical Youth
Listen to “Pass the Kouchie” by Mighty Diamonds

Musical Youth’s next single, “Youth of Today,” expanded on the theme of poverty, positing that the high cost of musical equipment was a sign of “judgment day.” It wasn’t long until the band faded into obscurity.

Musical Youth was rare among children’s bands in that they had very little in the way of adult supervision. They weren’t crafted to order by parents or producers to make a killing in the marketplace. It’s something they shared with L’Trimm, a pair of high school friends from Miami, who found themselves in a recording booth during the burgeoning of the city’s signature rap subgenre, bass.

“Grab It,” which the duo released in 1988, was a response to Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s “Push It.” The song was dirty, encouraging girls to “grab that thing when it’s up in your face because when you push it too far, he’ll go another place.” L’Trimm was reportedly 18 when they recorded the song, but it sounds childish to an uncomfortable extent, violating all taboos against the frank expression of children’s sexuality.

“Cars with the Boom,” on the other hand, is their masterwork. The song is like a diagram of teenage id. The girls drive around in a Jaguar (or a Lamborghini), checking out dudes and rhyming off-beat. They don’t want you, or me, unless one of us comes with a giant set of car speakers. Dumb? Yes. An ideal expression of youthful desire? Indubitably.

Listen to “Cars With the Boom” by L’Trimm

At the other extreme, you have the bands whose parents told them what to sing about. The Shaggs, three sisters in small town New Hampshire who were forced to practice day and night by their domineering and possibly abusive father, might be the most notable example. Their song “Who Are Parents?” belted out in its naive melody over the sisters’ idiosyncratic time structure, was clearly written to spec. Yet, in their voices and musical phrasing, you can hear the sisters’ longing for parents “who are always there,” and it eats through your gut.

Listen to “Who Are the Parents?” by The Shaggs

A more successful, or, at any rate, well-adjusted example of this phenomenon was Old Skull, the Madison, Wisc. punk rock band consisting of a pair of 10-year-old brothers, abetted by their father, a punk rock veteran. Old Skull’s music, about topics as diverse as homelessness, AIDS and dead eagles, is nearly unlistenable. The boys lack even the skewed, but consistent, musical sense of the Shaggs. It’s like a reductio ad absurdum of punk rock: the final and unironic passing of virtuosity.

Listen to “Kill a Dead Eagle” by Old Skull

On the other hand, Old Skull might fit snugly into the mainstream of punk rock. If you don’t believe me, compare “From a Little Kid’s Point of View” (summary: “I want more; I want more; I want the whole fucking store.”) with “Forming,” the Germs’ first single. In addition to comparable musical expertise, Old Skull might just have Darby Crash beat when it comes to theories of economics.

Listen to “Forming” by The Germs

Children’s bands have also made mountains of money for adults. Consider New Edition and New Kids on the Block, the pride of Boston, Mass. (That one band is completely black and the other completely white has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing stereotypes that the rest of the country harbors about the Hub of the Universe.) New Edition established a template for 1980s and 1990s boy bands: nonthreatening, yet calculatedly urban expressions of youthful desire.

Both sides of the 1983 album Candy Girl combine narratives of school yard love with tropes of food (“Candy Girl,” “Popcorn Love”), the synthesized soul of electro and the melodies of the Jackson 5. This approach to kids’ music would have its apotheosis in Another Bad Creation’s masterful “Playground,” which added rapping to the mix.

Listen to “Candy Girl” by New Edition
Listen to “Popcorn Love” by New Edition

New Edition had been the creation of Maurice Starr, a Boston music mogul who had been a member of electro pioneers Jonzun Crew. When New Edition split with Starr, he recruited New Kids on the Block to keep the money coming in. Their 1988 album Hangin’ Tough, which played up the urban street appeal of the New Kids (and left the world the execrable title track) sounded oddly behind the times. The album’s biggest hit, “You’ve Got It (The Right Stuff)” sounds like a rejected idea from Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual; it had ignored the many good musical ideas that had come along since. Its sentiments are vanilla, the song itself unmemorable.

Listen to “You Got It (The Right Stuff)” by New Kids on the Block

The New Kids on the Block have put out an album this month, and it remains to be seen whether their new crop of songs will wilt from popular esteem so quickly. But, when the boys dismiss their kiddie past by threatening to give us “some grown man,” one worries that they protest too much.

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